Click on over to watch Rep. Tom Cotton’s short speech from the floor. It is a MUST watch. “Today Congressman Tom Cotton spoke, along with other House members, on the formation of the select committee on Benghazi. With barely controlled indignation, he ripped the Democrats’ “fake outrage” over the Benghazi investigation. Recalling the treacherous conduct of many Democrats during the Iraq war, he asked, Where was the outrage then? Cotton harkened back to the lessons he learned in the Army, noting that on the night of September 11, 2012, Barack Obama failed to meet the standard that the Army expects from its lieutenants. He concluded with one more lesson from his military days:

Four Americans lost their lives that night in Benghazi. They deserve justice and the American people deserve the truth. One other lesson I learned in the Army is we leave no man behind. We will not leave these four men behind.” TOM COTTON SAVAGES DEMOCRATS ON BENGHAZI

More on the above. “Via the Free Beacon, a valiant attempt to shame Democrats and their media friends into dropping their outrageously outrageous outrage about Republicans using the new Benghazi committee to raise dough. Valiant but futile, that is: Read today’s New York Times editorial on the committee and tell me how it differs from something Debbie Wasserman-Schultz’s office might put out. The left’s narrative on the committee is straightforward and unified — everything about it is illegitimate, from the GOP tilt of the membership (seven Republicans, five Democrats) to the pre-midterm timing to, yes, the sort of cash grab that Democrats engaged in themselves vis-a-vis Iraq. Any argument they can find to discourage the public from paying attention is an argument worth using. You’re not going to shame them out of that. That being so, how much is Benghazi fundraising really worth to the GOP? Trey Gowdy thinks the party should lay off lest the committee come to be seen as some sort of political commercial. Republicans aren’t listening to him but they should. If they’re serious about the investigation, protecting its legitimacy is job one.” Tom Cotton on Benghazi fundraising: Where was this outrage when Democrats fundraised off the Iraq war?

As always, what’s not okay for the Republicans is apparently okay for Democrats. “Warren writes:

All three of my brothers served in the military, and I know firsthand how much Americans serving abroad — and their families — sacrifice. What happened in Benghazi on Sept. 11, 2012 was a tragedy. Four Americans died putting themselves in harm’s way in service to peace, diplomacy, and their country. I look at what happened in Benghazi with sadness, with seriousness, and as yet another call to honor the men and women who keep us safe.

So let me be blunt: that kind of seriousness is sorely missing from the no holds-barred political theater of the House Republicans.

Doing what’s right. “These hearings are a big political risk for Republicans. Going into the 2014 election, they stand to benefit from the major issues — Obamacare, the economy, chronic unemployment — from which Benghazi hearings can only distract. Worse, if botched like previous hearings on the matter, these hearings could backfire against the GOP, as did the 1998 Clinton impeachment proceedings. On purely partisan considerations, the hearings are not worth the political risk. But the country deserves the truth. They’ll get it if the GOP can keep the proceedings clean, factual, and dispassionate. No speeches. No grandstanding. Gowdy has got to be a tough disciplinarian — especially toward his own side of the aisle.” Republicans Move on Benghazi: If the committee produces new, important evidence, it will be impossible to ignore.

“The Democrats and their allies are in the grips of Benghazi denial. They think the Republican notion of a scandal is a complete hoax. Yes, a mistake was made here or there, but otherwise, nothing to see here. The deniers evidently believe: An administration should be able to make erroneous statements about a terror attack that killed a U.S. ambassador in the weeks before a presidential election and expect everyone to accept its good intentions afterward. An administration should be able to withhold a bombshell White House email from congressional investigators and expect everyone to greet its long-delayed release with a yawn. An administration should be able to send out its press secretary to abase himself with absurd denials of the obvious and expect everyone to consider its credibility solidly intact. No opposition party would ever accept these propositions, and of course Republicans (and a few intrepid reporters and organizations) haven’t. We presumably would never have learned of the email from White House national security official Ben Rhodes to then-ambassador to the United Nations Susan Rice prior to her notorious Sunday show appearances if the Benghazi “obsessives” at Judicial Watch hadn’t zealously pursued records through a lawsuit.” The Benghazi Deniers

“But rather than solely focus on how much rope to give Republicans to hang themselves, Democrats shouldn’t blithely assume that Gowdy will not uncover more embarrassing revelations about the various aspects of the tragedy, including the failure to heed warnings about terrorism as well as the misleading talking points. Just as Republicans need to worry about playing their roles as dogged pursuers of the truth rather than a political attack squad, so, too, Democrats need to be careful not to overplay their hand. Democrats acted this week as if they think they have nothing to lose in defending Lerner against contempt charges or stopping the GOP from forcing her to divulge whether anyone higher up in the government food chain had a role in the targeting of conservatives. By the same token, they seem to think that obstructing or mocking the Benghazi investigation will only help them in the midterms as well as protect Clinton’s 2016 presidential prospects. Yet if Republicans conduct a serious investigation of Benghazi—as Gowdy intends to do—Democrats would be wise to join the South Carolinian in pursuit of the truth. If the probe comes up with nothing embarrassing for the administration and Clinton, they will have lost nothing. But if the select committee—which will have subpoena power and legal counsels conducting a thorough legal process—does learn that the Rhodes email was just the tip of the iceberg, then they, and not the Republicans, will be the big losers if they continue to kibitz on the sidelines. The ability of the administration and the media to table these stories is finished, and the sooner Democrats realize that the better off they will be.” Both Parties Face Traps on Benghazi, IRS

Two representatives from Arizona attempting to save their hides, emphasis mine. “Seven Democrats crossed party lines and joined House Republicans to establish a Select Committee to investigate the September 11, 2012 attack on the U.S. Consulate and CIA annex in Benghazi, Libya on Thursday night. These Democrats were Reps. Ron Barber (D-AZ), John Barrow (D-GA), Mike McIntyre (D-NC), Patrick Murphy (D-FL), Collin Peterson (D-MN), Nick Rahall (D-WV), and Kyrsten Sinema (D-AZ). The resolution passed 232-186.” HOUSE CREATES BENGHAZI SELECT COMMITTEE WITH HELP FROM SEVEN DEMOCRATS

Click on over to read more about the selected committee members: Chairman Trey Gowdy (R-S.C.), Rep. Susan Brooks (R-Ind.) Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio), Rep. Mike Pompeo (R-Kan.), Rep. Martha Robey (R-Ala.), Rep. Peter Roskam (R-Ill.), and Rep. Lynn Westmoreland (R-Ga.). Who are the members of the new House Benghazi committee?

Why do Democrats hate the truth? “Sounds to me like those three elements in the first paragraph are her demands for full Democratic participation. If Boehner refuses, then she’ll only send one or two members. (I’d be shocked if they skipped it entirely.) But that raises a question: What would Boehner like to see happen here? Does he want a Dem boycott? Does he care either way? They’re going to screech that the committee’s bogus no matter what happens, in which case maybe Boehner figures that it’s better not to have them there at all. Let Gowdy and the rest of the GOP contingent have free rein to tee off on Democratic witnesses. After a few days of that, Pelosi will cave and appoint some Democratic members whether he agrees to her demands or not. I’m eager to see if he calls her bluff here.” Pelosi protests new Benghazi committee by declining to appoint Democrats to it — for now

My apologize in advance for the harsh language used in this posting, but what needs to be said needs to be said. Be sure to click on over to Michelle Obama’s pouty face. It’s pretty funny. “I did a lot of research on human trafficking and modern slavery before Mike Kupari and I wrote Swords of Exodus. It is a horrible, evil, and surprisingly gigantic thing. One thing I’m fairly sure of about the kind of people who do that sort of thing for a living, is that they really don’t give a shit about a bunch of American movie stars taking pouty selfies of themselves holding up signs with hash tag give our girls back. The disapproval of fat, soft, Americans on Facebook really doesn’t move them. They care about getting paid or getting killed, that’s about it. The self-righteous pouting is useless. For the idiot libprog pussies with the selfies, the world is a violent place, filled with violent men. If you actually want something to be done about these evil people, maybe you shouldn’t bitch, whine, and moan every time our military takes action against evil people. It seems odd to me that the same people demanding military action for this are the same ones that complain about military action for anything else. Oh, but wait, I forgot, the left has no overriding principles, and to them violence is always bad unless their guy does it, and evil is relative depending on how it trends on Twitter.” Operation Pouty Face

More on the Twitter diplomacy. “While Mrs. Clinton now issues indignant tweets, Mr. Rogin elaborates on her failure to mention

I hate the “political questions” but they’ve got to be asked I suppose. “Already battered by Benghazi — and with more battering certain to come, how damning we don’t yet know — Hillary Clinton has been slammed once again by news that the State Department, while she was secretary of State, refused to brand Boko Haram as a terror organization. (One wonders what they would have called the Gestapo.) Josh Rogin of The Daily Beast broke this highly disturbing story:

The State Department under Hillary Clinton fought hard against placing the al Qaeda-linked militant group Boko Haram on its official list of foreign terrorist organizations for two years. And now, lawmakers and former U.S. officials are saying that the decision may have hampered the American government’s ability to confront the Nigerian group that shocked the world by abducting hundreds of innocent girls.

In the past week, Clinton, who made protecting women and girls a key pillar of her tenure at the State Department, has been a vocal advocate for the 200 Nigerian girls kidnapped by Boko Haram, the loosely organized group of militants terrorizing northern Nigeria. Her May 4 tweet about the girls, using the hashtag #BringBackOurGirls, was cited across the media and widely credited for raising awareness of their plight.

The Bama attack showed [Boko Haram’s] substantial firepower, including machine guns, large numbers of rocket propelled grenades (RPGs) and pick-up trucks mounted with anti-aircraft guns, a sign the weapons flood from the Libyan war that helped rebels seize parts of Mali last year has reached Nigeria, officials say.

Mr. Clinton not only stated that poverty was the cause, but that specifically, Islam and religion could not be blamed in any way.“You have to somehow bring economic opportunity to the people who don’t have it,” Clinton stated. He added, “You have all these political problems — and now violence problems — that appear to be rooted in religious differences and all the rhetoric of the Boko Harams and others. But the truth is the poverty rate in the north is three times of what it is in Lagos.”

This psychopathy, like many psychopathy, has several causes. The government of Nigeria has long been accused of being, by turns, corrupt, incompetent, and oppressive. And poverty is a sadly enduring incubator of social pathologies.* But it is beyond absurd to claim that ideas and ideology have nothing to do with it. The Left forever claims this when it comes to global jihad — that it is not the Islamist ideology to blame, but rather “root causes” such as poverty or Western Aggression. That’s a strange thing for anyone on the American Left to claim — because they vigorously attempt to marginalize, delegitimize, and silence any ideas conflicting with their own. Why? Well, obviously they fear that ideas have power, and that if people believe ideas contrary to the left’s ideas, then the nation will change from what it otherwise would have been. It will turn from the America that could be, as Hillary Clinton would say.” Boko Haram Now Armed With Weapons Gotten From… Post-Invasion Libya

Climate Change

Giving himself a legacy at the expense of the American people. “On Wednesday the White House released the quadrennial National Climate Assessment, an 829-page report. The theme is that “this is not some distant problem of the future. This is a problem that is affecting Americans right now,” as Mr. Obama told lovable weather personality Al Roker. His “Today Show” interview was one of eight hits with television meteorologists to promote the report, part of a coordinated political campaign to scare Americans into supporting his anticarbon tax-and-regulation agenda. The report is designed to dramatize the supposed immediacy of climate change by concentrating on droughts, floods, heat waves, torrential rains, wildfires, polar-vortex winters and other indicia of the end of days. Everybody “gets” the weather. [Snip] The report reveals less about climate than it does about the method of the President who described the night he won the Democratic nomination as “the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal.” The White House is telling all and sundry that Mr. Obama wants to fill out his last two and a half years in office with action on climate change, but the report shows he doesn’t want an open or honest debate.” Obama’s Climate Bomb: He’s flogging disaster scenarios to promote his political agenda.

They don’t intend to change their lifestyles. It’s the “little people” that will be forced to change. Remember, this IS NOT about climate change, it is ABOUT CONTROL. “Drudge is right. It’s hard to take people who are CONCERNED about climate change seriously, because their CONCERN is almost always inversely related to the amount of personal inconvenience they’re confronted with. (It might be necessary to stipulate here that Al Gore having to cough up a couple million dollars extra to build his entire mansion out of solar panels does not qualify as a personal inconvenience; same goes for Democrats Senators who stay up late to give a speech.) As Sonny recently explained, this is one of the most aggravating characteristics of the liberal worldview. Media Matters, for example, is the most foremost liberal champion of labor unions—until its employees actuallytry to form a union. The White House complains about the scourge of unpaid internships—while refusing to pay its own interns. (Not that they need the money, as many of them are the children of top campaign donors.) When it comes to climate change, liberals believe emphatically that SOMETHING MUST BE DONE, but few of them are actually willing to do anything that would even slightly disrupt their daily lives, such as forgoing a plane ride to California, or driving 50 mph on the highway, or riding a bike to work, or personally boycotting products made in China, the world’s largest polluter.” Yes, President Obama Should Forgo Air Travel to Prove He Is Serious About Climate Change

The Debt

Tell us something we don’t already know Janet. “The total debt of the federal government at the end of fiscal 2013–including both the debt held by the public and the intragovernmental debt–was $16.719 trillion. The CBO estimates that by 2024, the total debt of the federal government will be $27.159 trillion—of which $20.947 trillion will be debt held by the public. If that projection holds up, the federal debt held by the public in 2024 would be more than four times the $5.035 trillion federal debt held by the public at the end of 2007.” Fed Chair: ‘Deficits Will Rise to Unsustainable Levels’

The Economy

Click on over to read the whole thing. Emphasis mine.“This morning [yesterday], Federal Reserve Chairman Janet Yellen is testifying before the Senate Budget Committee. The Fed has largely dominated economic policy in recent years, with its program of “quantitative easing” intended to stimulate the economy. It has certainly stimulated the stock market, but the real economy continues to languish. Senator Jeff Sessions delivered remarks this morning as the committee’s ranking Republican; they reflect his usual sound judgment:

Like the foundation of a home, America’s economy must be built on something real, something solid, and something firmly planted. Neither federal stimulus in the form of easy money, nor fiscal stimulus in the form of government borrowing, can produce real, lasting prosperity or a sound financial future. …

No government regulator, no matter how intelligent, can see into the future or micromanage the economy. Let us consider the testimony of former Chairman Alan Greenspan, before this very committee, in January of 2001. Chairman Greenspan came to alert Congress about an urgent policy decision it would have to make. And what was that decision? Whether to raise interest rates? Reduce subprime lending? Reform entitlements? No, Chairman Greenspan came to warn us that we would have to decide how to spend all of the surplus money after we soon paid off the entire federal debt of the United States. He predicted budget surpluses “well past 2030 despite the budgetary pressures from the aging baby boom generation,” and said that “the highly desirable goal of paying off the federal debt is in reach before the end of the decade.”

So much at stake in November of this year, and in 2016. “Conservatives need to wake up and start thinking past the rapidly passing age of Obama. Increasingly likely every day is that voters this November will remove Harry Reid as Senate Majority Leader. By electing a new Republican Senate majority, the voters will also render Barack Obama a lame duck, one of the lamest in history, as he will have no prayer of getting any of his legislative proposals — increasingly recognized as hard left — through Congress. (Despite his early national rhetoric, Obama doesn’t do bipartisanship.) That new Republican Senate majority will also be a new check and balance on Obama’s appointment of federal judges, reversing the effect of the Reid rule change eliminating Republican judicial filibusters. That is especially crucial given that the five remaining Reagan/Bush appointees on the Court constitute the slimmest of majorities, with a couple of occasionally weak sisters among them. If just one of these five is replaced by another Elena Kagan or Sonia Sotomayor, the resulting shift from a Reagan majority on the Court to an Obama one would mean a longer-term Obama transformation of America. Given the long-term cycles of American political history, Obama’s second midterm this year should be even worse for Democrats than the disastrous Obama first midterm in 2010. And the polls are bearing out that possibility.” LIGHT AT THE END OF THE TUNNEL: The passing of the Age of Obama.

Hopefully the Republicans select an exceptional candidate that can win against Senator Landrieu in November! “Sen. Mary Landrieu has been doin’ work over the past couple of weeks to portray herself as pretty much the One True Champion of the Keystone XL pipeline; it goes without saying that her fellow Democrats who remain opposed are feckless Obama rubber-stampers on the matter (not like her, you see — she’s willing to personally take the president to task), while Republicans, she contends, are merely out to exploit the pipeline’s popularity as an election issue through whichthey can rage about Obama’s anti-jobs agenda clear through November. I’m sure Landrieu wouldn’t know anything about that kind of attitude, ahem — but whatever the case, consider the latest polling from Southern Media & Opinion Research. Ouch.” SMOR poll: Mary Landrieu hits a career low in Louisiana with only 39 percent approval

This excerpt is long, but worth a read! “The left’s modus operandi is to divide Americans into groups. By race, by religion, by “sexual orientation,” whatever; divide and conquer. “We don’t progress,” they tell us, “because of ‘them,’ they’ve rigged the system against you.” It is repugnant to me. I did not grow up putting people in boxes against each other. But liberals live by it. Even the news about this research brings up the themes. Katherine Ritchey of the Pew Research Center writes of the study: “These trends suggest that some religious polarization is taking place among U.S. Latinos.” I want to be fair to Miss Ritchey. I don’t know her, and I would not want to question her motives. But I cringe when reading that line. What polarization? I am an evangelical Christian. I am a Southern Baptist. My mother is Lutheran; my father is Catholic. There is no polarization. I find more and more of my fellow Hispanics waking up to these exploitations of our fears. The media landscape is changing. The left’s monopoly on messaging has broken, and they can’t manipulate every group as they once did. Have you seen all the efforts now to police radio and the Internet? They are desperate. They absolutely hate Fox News, Drudge, and Breitbart, among many others. This is slowly happening for the Spanish-speaking media as well. Just last month, the Media Research Center (MRC), which has been so instrumental in exposing the leftist media bias under the leadership of Brent Bozell, launched MRC Latino. This new watchdog group will hold Hispanic media to the same standard of objectivity that has given MRC so much success with the mainstream media. Groups like Concerned Women for America (CWA), the nation’s largest public policy women organization, have begun to make resources available in Spanish to help empower the Hispanic community. The new offices for the El Paso chapter of CWA of Texas just opened a few months ago under the leadership of Rosa Cabrera. Rosa is also a radio talk show host who is bringing a conservative voice to a predominantly Hispanic population in the El Paso area. This is why I believe that, though it will take a while, we will continue to see an increase of Hispanic conservatives who reject the left’s bogus claims and will start raising their united voices in support of what we believe to be true and good. The left should tremble at the thought.” Column: The Coming Hispanic Conservative Awakening

Hillary Clinton

How will we stop her? “Face it. Hillary really is George W. Bush. Bush the Elder won easily in 1988, with 40 states and 426 electoral votes. The third term, but calmer, is a good pitch. To stop a sequel the GOP will have to avoid their Dukakis, the man who seemed different, but who wasn’t, in the end, anything except a decent but dull pol from a base state. The GOP will need a nominee with both fire in the belly and brains in abundance; rhetorical ability and an understanding of the world as it is, not as we would wish it to be. And with experience in running a big campaign to match Hillary’s half dozen times around the track as spouse in 1992 and 1996, loyal White House supporter of Al Gore in 2000, would-be nominee in 2008, and No. 1 Cabinet member in 2012. And in two years, 2016 will be the exercise of campaign muscle memory for her. There will be no unforced errors, just as George H.W. Bush learned from 1980 and 1984.” Hillary Clinton is Obama’s George H.W. Bush: The designated successor

The Left

This article was beyond depressing. The Left just never learns. “We don’t need to guess how de Blasio’s welfare philosophy will pan out. New York has been down this road before. In 1960, 328,000 New Yorkers were on cash assistance. By 1972, after two terms of Mayor John Lindsay, the rolls had exploded to nearly 1.25 million. One in every ten welfare recipients in the United States lived in New York City. As de Blasio promises to do again, Lindsay dismantled the city’s welfare-fraud detection system, leading the Daily News to dub his welfare commissioner “Come-and-Get-It Ginsberg.” Lindsay sniffed that asking welfare recipients to work would return the city to the “dark ages.” What emerged from the Lindsay years was a true tale of two New Yorks, in which an ever-diminishing taxpayer base supported an ever-growing dependency class that lived outside the norms of bourgeois society. Today’s welfare rolls stand at 348,000—barely over the level of 1960, before the entitlement mentality took over large swaths of the New York population. Watch that number, as well as the city’s crime data, to see how de Blasio’s progressive experiment is faring.” Back to Welfare’s Future in New York: Mayor Bill de Blasio sets out to dismantle the reforms of the Giuliani-Bloomberg era.

This article is from 2008 but it is worth a read. Chicago in decline as a result of years and years of Leftist policies, which is what’s about to happen in New York City. “The largest employer in the city of Chicago is the Federal government. Followed by the City of Chicago Public School system. Other major employers are the city of Chicago, the Chicago Transit Authority, the Cook County government, and the Chicago Park District. These thousands of government workers provide the backbone of the coalition for higher taxes, generous pensions and “political stability”. Chicago’s political system is inefficient and costly. There are no term limits in Chicago. The Democratic Party has controlled the Mayor’s office since 1931(a big city record). There’s no opposition: Democrat’s control 49 out of 50 seats on the city council. Corruption is everywhere. Barely a month can go by without a major scandal. The FBI has the largest public corruption squad in the United States located in Chicago . Chicago voters don’t seem to care. Those who care about high taxes, good public schools, and low crime are a small minority in Chicago.” THE DECLINE OF CHICAGO: THE CITY THAT DOESN’T WORK

The Media

The Left goes to destroy a black conservative because it might ruin the Left’s narrative that Republicans are racist. “That’s the Post’s evenhanded approach: supporters of Scott are neoconfederates, and opponents are black politicians in both the House and Senate and black community leaders. Which side are you on? The Post’s attack on Scott is really nothing new, though the overt prejudice of the piece is a bit brazen. It’s part of the left’s standard line that non-liberal black politicians are the wrong kind of African Americans, and their racial identity must then be denied or delegitimized while equating true racial identity with the political platform of the American Democratic Party, thus erasing black Americans’ history and experience because it is inconvenient to liberals’ quest for political power.” WaPo’s Insanely Racist Attack on Tim Scott

President Obama

“This was a week when the president tried to manufacture distraction and enthusiasm simultaneously, difficult even for the world’s greatest orator. He tried to distract attention from the sins and omissions of his administration, to get people talking about death by approaching weather instead of death in Benghazi, or the manifold abuses of the Internal Revenue Service. He stopped in Arkansas en route to California to be photographed standing tall amid the ruins of a town destroyed by a tornado, just two days after the release of a new government report with warmed-over predictions of deadly weather He was met by skeptics and suspicion.” PRUDEN: Barack Obama’s dysfunctional Washington

“Here’s what’s more disconcerting. Their [Republicans] willingness to say no to everything — the fact that since 2007, they have filibustered about 500 pieces of legislation that would help the middle class just gives you a sense of how opposed they are to any progress — has actually led to an increase in cynicism and discouragement among the people who were counting on us to fight for them.”

Kessler judges this claim to be false. What is most interesting, however, is Kessler’s description of the calculation that has gone into the falsehood. Welcome to Obamaland:

Obama’s [filibuster] count also includes at least a half-dozen instances when Republicans were blocked by Democrats through use of the filibuster. In fact, in the biggest oddity, the president reached back to 2007 in making his claim, so he includes two years when he was still a senator. On eight occasions, he voted against ending debate—the very thing he decried in his remarks.

In his conclusion, Kessler notes that Obama “inflated the numbers to such an extent that he even included votes in which he, as senator, supported a filibuster.” As with Harry Reid’s endless defamation of the Koch brothers, characterizing the statement as a falsehood doesn’t do justice to what is happening here.” ¿QUIÉN ES EL MENTIROSO MÁS GRANDE?

We’ve got a terrific line up for our annual Christmas program. First up will be the Ignite Barbershop Quartet. Ignite began singing together after a quartet matching party in November 2015. They are all Champion members of Region 21’s Scottsdale Chorus and they will be singing for us!

After lunch, Congressional District 6 congressman, Representative David Schweikart, will talk to us about what’s happening in Washington DC, and provide us with a status of the Tax Bill working its way through the House of Representatives and Senate.

Finally, member Julia Graham will install our new 2018/2019 officers. We look forward to seeing you and be sure to bring a friend or two or three!